Standards & method
How a legal change becomes a published report
Hemp Law Watch is a reference publication, not a law firm. Our method is designed so a reader can audit any statement we make and see exactly how confident we were when we made it.
A source is submitted
A contributor files a report with the article’s headline, credited author, publishing organisation, publication date and link, plus the jurisdiction and the classification of the legal change.
Automated checks run
The system confirms every required citation field is present and retrieves each source to record its status and whatever title the publisher exposes. Authorship is then assessed as a signal.
Two independent sources
A significant change must be corroborated by at least two independent reputable publishers. Federal classifications cannot clear review without it, and stay in draft until they do.
An editor decides
A reviewer confirms the corroboration, validates the federal or state classification and severity label, records notes, and either approves the report or returns it to draft.
What the alert classifications mean
Federal charges have been brought, or federal law has changed in a way that reaches conduct across states.
The conduct is treated as a misdemeanour under state law. Penalties and enforcement practice vary by jurisdiction.
The conduct draws a civil citation or fine rather than criminal charges.
A legislative or regulatory change with no reported criminal exposure attached to it.
Color is never the only carrier of meaning. Every alert appears with a written label, an icon, and a short accessible status line, and the flashing federal treatment is replaced by a static high-contrast border when a visitor has asked their device to reduce motion.
On authorship signals
Automated analysis cannot prove who wrote a document. We do not claim that it can. What our checks produce is a signal: whether a specific reporter is credited on the cited page, whether the page is issued under the authority of a government body or regulator, or whether authorship is simply unclear.
When authorship is unclear, the report may still publish, but it carries a visible authorship warning and the citation card for that source is drawn with a warning border so no reader can miss it.
Corrections and submissions
The review queue keeps an audit trail: every submission, automated check, authorship assessment, warning, approval and rejection is recorded with the reviewer and the time it happened. Nothing reaches a public feed, a state page, the atlas or the timeline until an editor has approved it.
Submit a source